Joseph Brodsky: Poet against an empire
by W.L.Webb
Joseph Brodsky, who has died aged 55, was as gifted with words and the power of metaphor as any poet among his contemporaries, but the emergence of his gift at a particular time and place --- he was born in Leningrad almost on the eve of the German invasion --- brought him other endowments.
He became the heir to the great tradition of modernism in Russian poetry, rooted in the moment early in the century when, Andrei Sinyavsky believes, this was the finest poetry in the world. Anna Akhmatova in her passionate old age herself annointed him, saying she had heard nothing like his poems since Osip Mandelstam. Nadezhda Mandelstam, characteristically, was more sceptical. Akhmatova, she wrote in her memoir of her martyred husband, Akhmatova's great contemporary, might have overestimated the young Brodsky as a poet because `she was terribly anxious that the thread of the tradition she represented should not be broken, and imagining she was again surrounded by poets, she thought she could detect a ferment in the air like that of those early years.' Still, Mrs Mandelstam went on, `He is ... a remarkable young man who will come to a bad end, I fear' --- which points to yet another still more equivocal, endowment which came with that blessing of Akhmatova's.
In one of his penetrating essays on Mandelstam, Brodsky talks about the older poet's `growing identification,' in the twenties, `with the archetypal predicament of `a poet versus an empire.'' This was also the predicament of the young Pushkin; and, before he was 24, of Joseph Brodsky too.
His career up to that point had not been of the kind that won gold stars or opinions in official Soviet society. For a start, he had been born a Jew (`100 per cent Jew, with a tremendous reservoir of guilt'), the son of a naval officer who had been dismissed when he reached the most senior rank then permitted to Jews; this was in 1949, the year which saw the arrest and execution of the entire Leningrad party leadership. The son dismissed himself from school at the age of 15, read voraciously in the margins of various temporary jobs (one of them as a mortuary assistant at coroners' autopsies), and began writing at the age of 18, a crucial member of that generation and milieu he describes so warmly in one of the autobiographical essays in his prose collection, Less Than One:
`Nobody knew literature and history better than these people, nobody could write in Russian better than they, nobody despised our times more profoundly. For these characters civilization meant more than daily bread and a nightly hug. This wasn't, as it might seem, another lost generation. This was the only generation of Russians that had found itself, for whom Giotto and Mandelstam were more imperative than their own personal destinies.'
He was taken up by Akhmatova on the strength of early poems --- very different from hers --- circulated in `samizdat' and by his early twenties, reading at clandestine poets' gatherings, he had become the darling of a milieu where the natural Russian passion for poetry was again being pressure- cooked by censorship and repression. And this in spite of the picture Mrs Mandelstam gives of him at work: `I have heard Brodsky read his verse. An active part in the process is played by his nose. I have never known anything like it before in all my life: his nostrils expand and contract and do all kinds of funny things, giving a nasal twang to each vowel and consonant. It is like a wind orchestra.' The quality of the writing spoke for itself just as unmistakably, however, in poems like The Great Elegy for John Donne, which dreams a sleeping 17th century London, a sleeping island, with the poet asleep under the dome of St Paul's, and his poems sleeping too:
The verses sleep. The stern iambi sleep
The trochees sleep like guards, to left, to right
and in them sleeps a glimpse of Lethe's brook,
and something else beside it sleeping --- fame.'
Another glimpse of the young Brodsky shows him, when the ink was barely dry, reading this poem aloud `con amore' to his friend Anatoly Naiman in a railway station booking hall, to the horror of the stolid ranks of Soviet citizens queueing for tickets.
Inevitably this irregular patronage and fame, unauthorised by membership of the Writers' Union, unauthenticated even by a university degree, meant that he was soon taken up by critics of a different sort. In the days following the fall from grace of Krushchev and his erratic de-Stalinising, the thought police of one kind and another, literary and administrative, reacted with predictable resentment to Brodsky's far from subdued display of talent and obduracy.
There were several nasty preliminary harassments. In November 1963 he was attacked in the Leningrad press (a piece entitled A Semi-literate Parasite), and on a bitter night shortly before Christmas he was surrounded by three men, wrestled into the back of a car and eventually held in the Kashchenko psychiatric hospital in Moscow until January 5. As soon as he returned to Leningrad he was arrested and finally brought to court on February 14, 1964 charged with social parasitism: since he wasn't a poet licensed by the Writers' Union or any other recognised authority, being a poet couldn't be held to be his gainful occupation, and by failing to take up any other, he was effectively a parasite or vagrant: QED.
By then, however, civil courage among writers and those who cared for literature and freedom, had advanced to the point that a full note of the trial was taken by a woman journalist, and soon got out to the West. It included the famous exchange with the uncomprehending or wilful judge that inscribed Brodsky's name, willy nilly, in the roll of poet-heroes:
Judge: `What is your occupation?'
Brodsky: `I am a poet.'
Judge: `Who recognised you as a poet? Who gave you the authority to call yourself a poet?'
Brodsky: `No one. Who gave me the authority to enter the human race?'
Judge: `Have you studied for it?'
Brodsky: `For what?'
Judge: `To become a poet. Why didn't you take further education at school where they prepare you, where you can learn?'
Brodsky: `I didn't think poetry was a matter of learning.'
Judge: `What is it then?'
Brodsky: `I think it is ... [with evident embarassment] ... a gift from God.'
After a further three weeks among the actually mad and `officially mad' in a psychiatric clinic (to which experience we owe the mordant Beckett-like cantos of Gorbunov and Gorchakov) he was sentenced to exile with five years hard labour on a remote state farm in Archangel province, but after less than two years, following as much pressure from Russian and foreign writers as could be brought to bear on that system. he was released in November 1965, to return to Leningrad, in poor health but for the time being at least, in peace. The years that followed he spent partly learning Polish in order to be able to translate Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz, and English so that he could learn deeply from and translate Donne and Andrew Marvell (his poem The Butterfly is an extraordinary reincarnation and translation of the spirit of English metaphysical poetry). He also needed English to be able properly to read Auden, another hero among the older generation of living poets, who during the early years of his coming exile would be important to him in a new literary universe as Akhmatova had been in his native realm.
He was no longer crudely persecuted, though when an invitation was sent to read at the Festival of two Worlds in Spoleto in 1969, the Union of Soviet Writers replied on his behalf, `There is no such poet in Soviet Russia.' Compared with the severity with which Sinyavsky and other writers were treated in the late sixties, Brodsky said, he had got off lightly: `Only two years. By Soviet standards it's positively homeopathic.' But in 1972 he again was obliged to lead the way in exile --- this time out of the Soviet Union altogether, to be followed in short order by Galich, Solzenitsyn, Zinoviev, Maksimov, Voinovich, Nekrasov and Vladimov.
Two days after Brodsky arrived unwillingly in Vienna, all his manuscripts confiscated and impounded in the airport customs store in Moscow, he was in Auden's house in Kirchstetten. He was already in Auden's debt not least for helping to focus a notion that would be central to his own aesthetic with those lines about how Time `Worships language and forgives/Everyone by whom it lives'. Now the old poet consoled him and `looked after my affairs with the diligence of a good mother hen,' offering, to Brodsky's embarrassment, to translate him, and, more immediately invaluable, fixing a grant from the Academy of American Poets that would tide him over until he arrived at the first of his several American teaching jobs, at the University of Michigan.
Exile and separation from the language Brodsky identified with the deepest spring of the poet's and the nation's soul did not, as the party police may have hoped, silence his troublesome tongue or weaken his spirit. He had understood and declared himself to be an exile in his own land long before he was made to leave it, so he was not now `beheaded' by physical severance. In any case, passionately though he was attached to the resonant music of his mother speech, his devotion to language was a kind of religious devotion, transcending the sounds and structures of any one tongue. As he put it in his acceptance speech when he was made Nobel laureate in 1987, it's not that language is the poet's instrument, but that he is its vessel.
If language was something like his god, separation made Mnemosyne Josef Brodsky's muse and consoling mate in his bereavement. Most literature is an art of memory, and all exiles are also sentenced to be memorialists, but the intensity of the gaze with which he conjured Leningrad's streets and buildings out of its Baltic marshland mists in poem after poem, and page after page of his prose, has more than a touch of the magus about it. In corners of cities everywhere, his sensitised eye found pieces of `Peter', as its natives were not to be dissuaded from knowing it: a gesture, a mood, a pediment, the limb of a statue, `I, too, once lived in a city whose cornices used to court/clouds with statues...' he writes in a poem for his Italian publisher. And passionately as he loves Venice, in his last prose work, Watermark, one often senses behind its celebrations of his love, the presence of that other, Northern dreamworld floating not in the Adriatic but the Baltic.
He repeats in Watermark the notion --- `water is the image of time' --- most memorably deployed in a Petersburg essay in Less Than One, the earlier prose collection which may prove to be the book by which he is best remembered by readers without Russian. `Reflected every second by thousands of square feet of running silver amalgam', wrote this son of a sailor-turned-photographer, this wideawake revenant scanning the quays of the Neva, `it's as if the city were constantly being filmed by its river.' Like his abiding preoccupation with time itself, it reminds you of his master Mandelstam, whose Journey to Armenia, for example, another visit recollected in short `takes', is as full of metaphors that make your hair stand on end. And like Mandelstam too, with all his power of memory Brodsky is eminently a poet of his present time, and a `renewer of language', as one of his best critics puts it, wrestling stoically with the bleak existential themes of the late twentieth century, but also getting to grips with the second, Anglo-American culture history has required him to take on. (He wrote his first poem in English, an Elegy on the death of Auden in 1975).
`Growing old! Good day, my old age!' The poet and his poetry had been fighting the battle with Time and death at least since the age of 32.
Time equals cold. Each
body, sooner
or later, falls prey to the
telescope. With the years,
it moves away from the
luminary, grows colder.
But the gift of the Word grants a stay of execution and, if not immortality, an afterlife, warmed by the spirit's aspiration:
...to God's least creature
is given voice for speech,
or
for song --- a sign
that it has found a way
to bind together
and stretch life's limits,
whether
an hour or day.
The way in which the Word most signally defeats Time (and other tyrannies, however), is by `remembering':
`And there was a city', he wrote in the title piece of Less Than One, recalling his route to school along the Neva.
`The most beautiful city on the face of the earth. With an immense grey river that hung over its distant bottom like
the immense grey sky over that river. Along that river there stood magnificent palaces with such beautifully
elaborated facades that if the little boy was standing on the right bank, the left bank looked like the imprint
of a giant mollusc called civilisation. Which ceased to exist.'
...typed from `The Guardian, Monday, January 29, 1996. written by W.L.Webb. Douglas Clark
69 Hillcrest Drive,
Bath, Avon, BA2 1HD, UK Voice: +44 1225 427104
Email: D.G.D.Clark@bath.ac.uk
Benjamin Press: http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc
http://www.sharat.co.il/nosik/brodsky/obituary/webbobit.html
From: Boris VELIKSON [boris@deborah.saclay.cea.fr]
Subject: INFO-RUSS: Smert' Brodskogo
To: info-russ@smarty.ece.jhu.edu
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 96 16:15:32 "WET
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Navsegda rasstaemsya s toboj, druzhok.
Narisuj na bumage prostoj kruzhok.
Eto budu ya: nichego vnutri.
Posmotri na nego, a potom sotri.
Umer Brodskij.
V XX veke russkaja literatura ne byla bedna talantami. Umiral odin, ostavalis' drugie. Ne tri, tak dva, ne dva, tak odin. A vot mezhdu odnim i nulem - raznica nalichiya i otsutstviya. Sejchas - ne ostalos' nikogo.
Brodskij uzhe umiral odin raz. I v svoem sobstvennom soznanii, i v soznanii ostavshihsya. Kogda v 72 godu ego vyperli, on ne mog predstavit' sebe svoego sushchestvovaniya vne goroda. Ego stihi posle etogo - stihi s togo sveta.
(Ya ne hochu citirovat' dlya teh, kto ne chital: ne dlya etogo stihi pishutsya). V Leningrade zhe ostavshiesya poety "andergraunda" stali bodro sporit', kto iz nih pervyj piit Peterburga. Ibo uezzhavshie ne proyavlyalis' bol'she nikogda, a stalo byt', perestavali sushchestvovat'. Zhal', neplohie poety prinimali v etom uchastie, no chitat' ih bol'she ne hochetsya.
Brodskij - dovol'no redkij, hotya ne unikal'nyj, primer lozhnoj slavy togo zhe urovnya, kotorogo dolzhna byla by byt' istinnaya. Drugoj hrestomatijnyj primer - Pushkin: kakoj zhe russkij ne znaet Pushkina? Tol'ko chitat' vot ego dlya etogo ne obyazatel'no. Brodskij - poet velikij, no kamernyj. Ne mogut ego lyubit' vse, ya ne pro narod, no dazhe pro iskrenne chitayushchuyu publiku. Ya imeyu pravo ob etom govorit': kogda ya govoril komu-nibud', chto Brodskij, kak mne kazhetsya, - poet urovnya Mandel'shtama, vo vtoroj polovine 60h godov eto vosprinimalos' kak eres' i preuvelichenie, granichivshee s neprilichiem.
Byli metry, i byl mal'chishka Brodskij, nu, "Piligrimy" tam, "Vasil'evskij ostrov", no kakie-to paradniki; poet, konechno, soslali, svolochi, no v obshchem - protezhe Ahmatovoj, i ne nado preuvelichivat', i voobshche u vseh, s kem vlast' ploho oboshlas', poyavlyaetsya preuvelichennaya izvestnost'.
Potom byl eshche period, kogda Brodskij byl poetom gorodskogo masshtaba: v Leningrade - "velikij", v stolice - predmet i primer piterskogo snobizma. Ya ochen' horosho pomnyu eto vremya, i kogda posle Nobelevskoj premii vdrug poyavilas' vsenarodnaya slava, dlya menya eto bylo koshchunstvo i licemerie.
Ne dolzhno byt' slavy posle premii. Ne smotrite Nobelevskomu komitetu v zuby, chitajte sami.
Za granicej zhe delo obstoyalo tak, kak vsegda obstoit. V Brown University Brodskogo ne izuchali, potomu chto on eshche ne umer. Izuchat' nado umershih, o nih mnenie ustoyalos'. (Poetomu izuchali "Cement" Gladkova, prichem v perevode). V U. of Connecticut Brodskogo prohodili. Izvestnejshaya rusistka harbinskogo prois\cydot hozhdeniya Irene Kirk sprashivala u studentov-oluhov: pochemu Brodskij napisal "Na Vasil'evskij Ostrov ya vernus' umirat'"? Oluhi ne znali.
Mrs Kirk otvechala: potomu chto na Vasil'evskom Ostrove nahoditsya Universitet, t.e., stalo byt', eto vrode kak residential area vozle kampusa, tam-to i zhivut intelligentnye lyudi.
Brodskij byl umen. Eto redkoe kachestvo u poeta. Kak-to poluchaetsya, chto obychno umenie rassuzhdat' meshaet neposredstvennomu proyavleniyu talanta, kak budto talant prohodit potokom ne cherez golovu, a pryamo na bumagu iz vozduha. Etim radikal'no otlichaetsya rannij - doot`ezdnyj - Brodskij ot posleot`ezdnogo. Do - on ne rassuzhdal, a perenosil na bumagu potok, s kotorym ne vsegda i spravlyalsya. Ya ochen' lyublyu eti stihi, v nih est' svezhest' i napor, kotorye on poteryal posle. Brodskij - razlyubil ih. On byl protiv ih perepechatki, i na vopros, neuzheli on ne lyubit dazhe "Shestvie", otvetil "Osobenno "Shestvie"". Eti stihi mnogim hotelos' polozhit' na muzyku, i inogda eto dazhe poluchalos', u Klyachkina i Mirzayana, hotya tut zhe oni zhe portili muzykoj drugie ego veshchi.
Posle ot`ezda Brodskij stal intellektualen i sovershenen. U nego ischezli sluchajnye slova, i kazhdaya fraza stala mysl'yu. (Moya fraza zvuchit ironichno, i ona i byla by ironiej v otnoshenii kogo-nibud' drugogo. Brodskij nastol'ko talantliv, chto i v etoj ipostasi pisal genial'nye stihi - tol'ko drugie). Interesno bylo slushat', chto on govorit; pro kakogo eshche poeta vy eto mozhete skazat'?
I Brodskij nikogda ne vysluzhivalsya, ni v kakoj ierarhii. Eto tozhe bol'shaya redkost' v Rossii. Mozhet byt', emu prosto povezlo. Predydushchim nado bylo vrat', chtoby poprostu vyzhit'. Ili, inogda, oni i vpravdu zaputyvalis' - eto proishodilo gorazdo chashche, chem sejchas hochetsya dumat', vziraya na sovetskij stroj s nashej chechenskoj vysoty. A potom - te, kto byli protiv, stali sozdavat' antiierarhii, i vpolne iskrenne vysluzhivat'sya v nih. Brodskij uehal nikem, a potom byl odin. Emu ne prishlos' imet' dela ni s kakoj iz etih ierarhij, i edinstvennoe, v chem on mog by raskaivat'sya - eto chto srazu posle vysylki napisal pis'mo Brezhnevu, gde prosilsya nazad. Nu tak ved' ne znal on, chto tak silen, chto sostoitsya i vne gnezda. Nebol'shoj eto greh.
No ya ne dumayu, chto emu prosto povezlo. Brodskij obladal redkim v russkoj tradicii chuvstvom ironii. V Rossii est' smeh, satira, chernyj yumor; ironiya - eto chuvstvo mery, kogda tebya ne zanosit, i ty smeesh'sya lish' nad tem, chto lozhno. Dlya etogo nado obladat' etim chuvstvom lozhnogo. Brodskij im bezuslovno obladal, a kto eshche - srazu v golovu ne prihodit. Tochnee, est', konechno, no kak i intellektual'nost', eto svojstvo redko sochetaetsya s tvorcheskoj genial'nost'yu: tvorchestvo sintetichno, a ironiya analitichna, i vrode, im nechego delat' vmeste. An vot poluchilos'. Tak chto dumayu ya, chto protivno bylo by emu igrat' rol'. No vse-taki horosho, chto ne poprosili.
Russkaya poeziya posle Brodskogo nahoditsya v strannom vide. On radikal'no izmenil sredstva vyrazheniya. Pisat' tak, kak do nego, uzhe nel'zya, no rezul'tat etogo obogashcheniya sovsem ne ocheviden: slishkom mnogo tekstov kazhutsya podrazhaniyami. Avos' utryasetsya - ili, avos', poyavitsya kto-to, komu nezachem budet pol'zovat'sya sredstvami Brodskogo. No eto lish' avos'.
Konchilas' epoha Brodskogo. Ne dlya mnogih ona - epoha Brodskogo, no poprobujte podumat', kto ot nee ostanetsya cherez N let. Brodskij-to ostanetsya. Novaya epoha ne budet epohoj kakogo-libo poeta. Poka chto pohozhe, chto ona budet epohoj massovoj slepoty.
B.VELKSON
http://www.sharat.co.il/nosik/brodsky/obituary/info-rus.html
Seven Strophes
I was but what you'd brush
with your palm, what your leaning
brow would hunch to in evening's
raven-black hush.
I was but what your gaze
in that dark could distinguish:
a dim shape to begin with,
later - features, a face.
It was you, on my right,
on my left, with your heated
sighs, who molded my helix
whispering at my side.
It was you by that black
window's trembling tulle pattern
who laid in my raw cavern
a voice calling you back.
I was practically blind.
You, appearing, then hiding,
gave me my sight and heightened
it. Thus some leave behind
a trace. Thus they make worlds.
Thus, having done so, at random
wastefully they abandon
their work to its whirls.
Thus, prey to speeds
of light, heat, cold, or darkness,
a sphere in space without markers
spins and spins.
1981, translated by Paul Graves.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/seven_strophes.html
Darling, you think it's love, it's just a midnight journey.
Best are the dales and rivers removed by force,
as from the next compartment throttles "Oh, stop it, Bernie,"
yet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours.
Hook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures,
alias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail!
Here the works are fewer than monkey wrenches,
and the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail.
Bark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller.
Dogs and block letters care how misfortune spells.
Still, you can tell yourself in the john by the spat-at mirror,
slamming the flush and emerging with clean lapels.
Only the liquid furniture cradles the dwindling figure.
Man shouldn't grow in size once he's been portrayed.
Look: what's been left behind is about as meager
as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon's blade.
1983, translated by the author.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/seaward.html
As though the mercury's under its tongue, it won't
talk. As though with the mercury in its sphincter,
immobile, by a leaf-coated pond
a statue stands white like a blight of winter.
After such snow, there is nothing indeed: the ins
and outs of centuries, pestered heather.
That's what coming full circle means -
when your countenance starts to resemble weather,
when Pygmalion's vanished. And you are free
to cloud your folds, to bare the navel.
Future at last! That is, bleached debris
of a glacier amid the five-lettered "never."
Hence the routine of a goddess, nee
alabaster, that lets roving pupils gorge on
the heart of color and the temperature of the knee.
That's what it looks like inside a virgin.
1983, translated by the author.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/galatea_encore.html
Tsushima Screen
The perilous yellow sun follows with its slant eyes
masts of the shuddered grove steaming up to capsize
in the frozen straits of Epiphany. February has fewer
days than the other months; therefore, it's more cruel
than the rest. Dearest, it's more sound
to wrap up our sailing round
the globe with habitual naval grace,
moving your cot to the fireplace
where our dreadnought is going under
in great smoke. Only fire can grasp a winter!
Golder unharnessed stallions in the chimney
dye their manes to more corvine shades as they near the finish,
and the dark room fills with the plaintive, incessant chirring
of a naked, lounging grasshopper one cannot cup in fingers.
1978, translated by the author.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/tsushima_screen.html
...
восходящее желтое солнце следит косыми
глазами за мачтами голой рощи,
идущей на всех парах к цусиме
крещенских морозов. февраль короче
прочих месяцев и оттого лютее.
кругосветное плавание, дорогая,
лучше кончить, руку согнув в локте и
вместе с дредноутом догорая
в недрах камина. забудь цусиму!
только огонь понимает зиму.
золотистые лошади без уздечек
масть в дымоходе меняют на масть воронью.
и в потемках стрекочет огромный черный кузнечик
которого не накрыть ладонью.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/voshodyaschee_zheltoe_solntse.html
Dutch Mistress
A hotel in whose ledgers departures are more prominent than arrivals.
With wet Koh-i-noors the October rain
strokes what's left of the naked brain.
In this country laid flat for the sake of rivers,
beer smells of Germany and the seaguls are
in the air like a page's soiled corners.
Morning enters the premises with a coroner's
punctuality, puts its ear
to the ribs of a cold radiator, detects sub-zero:
the afterlife has to start somewhere.
Correspondingly, the angelic curls
grow more blond, the skin gains its distant, lordly
white, while the bedding already coils
desperately in the basement laundry.
1981
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/dutch_mistress.html
A Polar Explorer
All the huskies are eaten. There is no space
left in the diary, And the beads of quick
words scatter over his spouse's sepia-shaded face
adding the date in question like a mole to her lovely cheek.
Next, the snapshot of his sister. He doesn't spare his kin:
what's been reached is the highest possible latitude!
And, like the silk stocking of a burlesque half-nude
queen, it climbs up his thigh: gangrene.
1977, translated by the author.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/polar_explorer.html
полярный исследователь
все собаки сьедены. в дневнике
не осталось чистой страницы. и бисер слов
покрывает фото супруги, к ее щеке
мушку дат сомнительных приколов.
дальше -- снимок сестры. он не щадит сестру:
рейь идет о достигнутой широте!
и гангрена, чернея, взбирается по бедру,
как чулок девицы из варьете.
22 июля 1978 г.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/polyarny_issledovatel.html
May 24, 1980
I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages,
carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters,
lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis,
dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles.
From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly
width. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.
Quit the country the bore and nursed me.
Those who forgot me would make a city.
I have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles,
worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter,
planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables,
guzzled everything save dry water.
I've admitted the sentries' third eye into my wet and foul
dreams. Munched the bread of exile; it's stale and warty.
Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl;
switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.
What should I say about my life? That it's long and abhors transparence.
Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit.
Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx,
only gratitude will be gushing from it.
1980, translated by the author.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/may_24_1980.html
North Baltic
To K.H.
When a blizzard powders the harbor, when the creaking pine
leaves in the air an imprint deeper than a sled's steel runner,
what degree of blueness can be gained by an eye? What sign
language can sprout from a chary manner?
Falling out of sight, the outside world
makes a face its hostage: pale, plain, snowbound.
thus a mollusc stays phosphorescent at the ocean's floor
and thus silence absorbs all speeds of sound.
Thus a match is enough to set a stove aglow;
thus a grandfather clock, a heartbeat's brother,
having stopped this side of the sea, still tick-tocks to show
time at the other.
1975, translated by the author.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/north_baltic.html
шведская музыка
к.х.
когда снег заметает море и скрип сосны
оставляет в воздухе след глубже, чем санный полоз,
до какой синевы могут дойти глаза? до какой тишины
может упасть безучастный голос?
пропадая без вести из виду, мир вовне
сводит счеты с лицом, как с заложником мамелюка.
...так моллюск фосфоресцирует на океанском дне,
так молчанье в себя вбирает всю скорость звука,
так довольно спички, чтобы разжечь плиту,
так стенные часы, сердцебиению вторя,
остановившись по эту, продолжают идти по ту
сторону моря.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/shvedskaya_musyka.html
Elegy
About a year has passed. I've returned to the place of the battle,
to its birds that have learned their unfolding of wings
from a subtle
lift of a surprised eyebrow, or perhaps from a razor blade
- wings, now the shade of early twilight, now of state
bad blood.
Now the place is abuzz with trading
in your ankles's remanants, bronzes
of sunburnt breastplates, dying laughter, bruises,
rumors of fresh reserves, memories of high treason,
laundered banners with imprints of the many
who since have risen.
All's overgrown with people. A ruin's a rather stubborn
architectural style. And the hearts's distinction
from a pitch-black cavern
isn't that great; not great enough to fear
that we may collide again like blind eggs somewhere.
At sunrise, when nobody stares at one's face, I often,
set out on foot to a monument cast in molten
lengthy bad dreams. And it says on the plinth "commander
in chief." But it reads "in grief," or "in brief,"
or "in going under."
1985, translated by the author.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/elegy.html
Folk Tune
It's not that the Muse feels like clamming up,
it's more like high time for the lad's last nap.
And the scarf-waving lass who wished him the best
drives a steamroller across his chest.
And the words won't rise either like that rod
or like logs to rejoin their old grove's sweet rot,
and, like eggs in the frying pan, the face
spills its eyes all over the pillowcase.
Are you warm tonight under those six veils
in that basin of yours whose strung bottom wails;
where like fish that gasp at the foreign blue
my raw lip was catching what then was you?
I would have hare's ears sewn to my bald head,
in thick woods for your sake I'd gulp drops of lead,
and from black gnarled snags in the oil-smooth pond
I'd bob up to your face as some Tirpitz won't.
But it's not on the cards or the waiter's tray,
and it pains to say where one's hair turns gray.
There are more blue veins than the blood to swell
their dried web, let alone some remote brain cell.
We are parting for good, my friend, that's that.
Draw an empty circle on your yellow pad.
This will be me: no insides in thrall.
Stare at it a while, then erase the scrawl.
Translated by the author.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~safonov/brodsky/folktune.html